Okasan Securities selects Fidessa SOR for PTS trading

First Published 5th January 2015

Okasan Securities chooses Fidessa's smart order routing system to enable PTS in Japan.

Tokyo - Okasan
Securities has selected Fidessa's Smart Order Routing system to
enable Proprietary Trading System trading as of early 2015.
Okasan Securities is already a client of Fidessa for both of
their agency and proprietary trading platforms. The SOR system
will be integrated into their existing trading platforms
alongside Fidessa's algorithmic trading engine.

Since the ease in regulation of the TOB (Take
Over Bid) 5% rule in October 2012 for PTSs, the market has seen
good growth in PTS trading with a large number of domestic asset
management companies (investment trusts and investment
advisories) trading PTSs through brokers. SOR enables agency
brokers to trade client orders smartly by automatically comparing
price and liquidity between the main Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE)
and alternative venues (PTSs and broker dark pools) to achieve
best execution. SOR, along with algorithm trading, is becoming
essential for securities firms providing execution services for
asset managers in Japan. So far the adoption of SOR has been
limited to major foreign and domestic securities firms.

PTSs in Japan (Chi-X Japan and SBI Japannext)
have established their presence with price improvements by
introducing decimal tick sizes. From early 2014 however, decimal
tick sizes have been gradually implemented for the TOPIX 100
universe on the TSE too. This raised some concerns on the
relevance of PTSs, however even after the TSE's introduction of
decimal tick sizes for small and mid-cap stocks beyond the TOPIX
100 last July, PTSs are still in existence and actively being
used.

Shirou Sato, Senior General Manager, Equities
Dept. at Okasan Securities, commented: "In order to strengthen
our execution services for our institutional clients, we made the
decision to enable PTS trading by implementing SOR through our
existing Fidessa system. As a result, we will be able to improve
our quality of institutional agency trading business and provide
our clients with best execution."

Ian Chilton, Chief Executive of Fidessa in
Japan, added: "We welcome Okasan's decision to adopt Fidessa's
SOR and are very pleased to contribute to adding value to their
agency business workflow with this additional module to their
Fidessa trading platform. We are determined to continue to meet
the needs of our domestic clients by supporting them with
innovative systems and high quality client support, so that
Fidessa will continue be seen as the best trading system for
Japanese domestic securities firms."